Over the past week and a half I’ve been working on getting the rules to Meteorus down on paper, which is always the hardest part about a game’s design for me. The game has already changed a bit from my original idea, and now includes a deck-building aspect to it. That means I now have to make the cards!

Starting the Game

Separate the cards into their respective piles (Weather, Disaster, Prestige). Create individual stacks for each weather type and place them face up on the table. Separate out the Prestige cards by value and place them face up on the table. Shuffle the Disaster cards and put the stack face down on the table.

Each player gets 3 “Cloudy Day” cards.

Each player will roll the standard die. Whoever rolls the highest is the starting player.
Ties are settled with re-rolls. Play continues clockwise around the table.

Playing the Game

Drawing Cards

Draw 3 cards and place them face up in front of you at the start of your turn. Resolve any special effect of these cards. If you have no cards left to draw, shuffle your discard pile and create a new draw deck. If all 3 cards drawn have a skull icon, draw and a resolve a disaster card.

Rolling the dice

Each turn the active player will roll the 5 ElemenT Dice, and may make 2 additional rerolls with any, or all, of the dice. Once the dice have been rolled, the player will then calculate the amount of Elemental Power they’ve earned for the round and take the appropriate tokens. Keep in mind that elemental trumps cancel out dice. Every Ether rolled is wild, and can be banked for future turns. Your personal Ether bank may not exceed 10. If the Sun is rolled on the yellow die, all dice are ignored, you stop rolling, and you’re given 3 wild Elemental Power to spend.

Buying Cards

After you’ve rolled the dice and calculated your Elemental Power for the round, you may purchase any weather cards with the power you’ve obtained. These cards are placed into your discard pile, and any unused Elemental Tokens are discarded.

Earning Prestige

Taking the value of the 3 Weather cards face up in front of you, you can now purchase Prestige cards. All purchased Prestige cards, and the Weather cards are now placed in the discard pile.

First player to 20 Prestige wins.

These rules are at their roughest draft right now. They need to be cleaned up, proofread, clarified, tested, etc… Think of them more as a brain dump for now while I work on the card deck for the game.

I’ve just started working on a new game for ElemenT Dice, tentatively called Meteorus. The game will be a set-collection type game with a weather-control theme.

I hope to have the rules finished up for initial play testing by the end of the week, and then I’ll post them here so everyone can play and give me feedback.

If you don’t have a set of ElemenT Dice, you can snag them inexpensively right here.

My first WBO tournament was a huge success, so I’m holding another one on May 25th.

This time I’m holding a Zero-G format tournament, which uses the rocking stadium released in Japan. It looks like that I’ll be holding regular tournaments from now on, though not as close together as my first and this one.

I’m hoping to hold another in July either at Connecticon, or at a local park again. More info once I know what’s going on.

My kids are really into Beyblade, so it’s gotten me into it also. Of course I love to research into just about anything I’m interested it, so I came across the World Beyblade Organization just before the holidays. It’s a great site with forums, a wiki, and other community features.

Another thing the WBO does is allow volunteers to host tournaments all over the world. A quick search showed that there haven’t been any tournaments in Connecticut, so I put things in motion to set one up.

Now, I’ll be hosting the first ever Connecticut WBO Beyblade tournament. Information about it is here (registration required.)

I’m hoping that not only will my kids get a kick out of it, but other local kids will too!

While at Toy Fair I set aside some time to talk to Games Workshop about getting Purple Pawn back in the PR loop. I also talked about getting some products to review every now and then.

Well after a great meeting, they sent me home with 40k Paint Set that also comes with a squad of 5 Dark Angel Space Marines. It’s been a long time since I’ve played 40k, so I was pretty excited.

Back in 2003 I sold my entire Space Marine army to help cover costs for my wedding. I by no means regret doing it. Now that my wife and I have kids, it seems like a great time to get my oldest into some miniature gaming. Starting with this paint set, and hopefully some more review product that’s on it’s way, I’m going to get back into 40k and chronicle my progress on Purple Pawn.

As soon as I start posting my progress over there I’ll make sure to link to the series from here. I’m sure it’ll be interesting.